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“Seat belt.”
I grabbed for it with shaking hands. “Is it them?”
“I don’t know.”
Demitri didn’t wait to find out. The car jerked forward, dirt spitting beneath the tyres. We shot down the narrow road, dust whipping behind us. He drove one-handed for a moment while pulling the gun from inside his jacket. He placed it in the space between us, close enough for him to reach.
I stared at it. It was black. Compact. Lethal. Just like everything else about Demitri. He was not the man I had thought him to be. He was not a simple priest, or a savior. And when the road bent and the car surged into the long, open mouth of the countryside, I understood something with a terrible clarity.
Safety had died with my father.
Demitri Marco was something else. Dangerous. Brutal. Damned in ways I did not yet understand. But alive.
The road stretched ahead, pale and merciless. Behind us, the dust rose like smoke. Ahead, the sun sank lower over the fields, staining everything gold. It should have been beautiful. Instead, it looked like the whole world had been set on fire.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I whisper-hissed as I hurried behind Demitri.
The question sounded foolish the moment it left my mouth. A man did not walk away from his church, fire a gun in a public street, abandon a vehicle, and place himself in the path of a cartel without some belief that he could survive it. More importantly, he would not have risked any of it for me if he thought we were already dead.
He could have left me beside the road after the attack. He could have driven until the danger passed, handed me money, and told me to disappear.
Instead, he reached back, caught my hand, and pulled me through the forecourt of the bus depot.
“Keep moving.”
His grip tightened around mine. I struggled to match his stride without drawing attention. Every hurried step jarred my ribs. The bruises along my side had hardened into a constant ache, but the sharpest pain came whenever I breathed too deeply.
The duffel bag hanging from my shoulder made it worse.
I shifted the strap, trying to carry the weight against my uninjured side. Inside were the clothes Demitri had bought, toiletries, bottled water, bread, fruit, and enough basic supplies to keep us from needing to stop again that day.
He carried an identical bag. It had been his idea to buy two. Everything Demitri had done since the café had been designed with a plan in mind.
The moment we escaped the gunfire, he had driven until the town disappeared behind us. He had taken secondary roads, doubled back twice, and watched the mirrors until the tension in his jaw looked painful. Then he asked whether I had a phone. When I told him I didn’t, he had checked his own. He’d removed the battery and discarded the pieces separately along the road.
Several kilometres later, he pulled into a petrol station crowded with delivery vans and farm vehicles. He told me to use the ladies’ room and change clothes while he went inside to purchase the bags and supplies.
At first, I had not understood why he wanted us to split up after we’d faced down danger earlier. I stared at him, waiting for an explanation.
“If they come asking questions,” he explained, “I want the attendant to remember a man travelling alone. Not a man and a woman.”
It was the kind of detail I would never have considered.
I had changed inside the cramped bathroom while every sound outside the door made my heart race. I changed out of the trousers, now stained with pasta sauce from the attack at the café, and pulled on dark jeans and a clean sweater. I pulled the sleeves of the sweater over my wrists to cover the bandages and kept the bruising around my throat hidden beneath the scarf.
When I emerged, Demitri was waiting beside the door with two charcoal beanies. He handed one to me. It concealed most of my hair without looking unusual. In the cold, nearly everyone who entered the petrol station wore something similar. Now, as he led me across the depot, I understood that survival depended on details other people ignored.
Demitri had abandoned the church-owned car beyond the petrol station. He’d wiped down the surfaces we had touched and removed the number plates. He believed the Coccico had located us at the café through the vehicle’s GPS system. I had not known whether he meant a tracker hidden by the men hunting me or the navigation hardware already installed in the car. Either possibility made me feel sick, because they had found us too quickly. We had changed routes. Avoided the motorway. Stopped in a town neither of us had planned to visit. Yet men with guns had been waiting.
“Will that stop them?” I had asked as we’d walked away from the abandoned car.
“No.” There was no softness in his voice as he answered. “But it’ll slow them down.”
That had become the measure of success. Not safety, but time and distance.
We crossed a muddy field and reached a narrow road where an elderly farmer was securing empty crates to the back of his truck. Demitri approached him with the easy confidence of a man who belonged wherever he stood. He said our car had broken down and we were trying to reach the nearest bus depot.
The farmer looked at our bags and then at my bruised face. I lowered my gaze before he could study me too closely. Demitri shifted closer, placing himself partly between us.
